I’m overreaching here, but I find this connection oddly amusing. First: Eugène Sue began publishing the serial novel The Wandering Jew in 1844, and it enjoyed great popularity in Paris. Although it made reference to the legendary figure who taunted Jesus on the way to crucifixion, the central thrust of the novel, set in 1831, was rather more anti-clerical. The intrigues of a Jesuit named Rodin figure strongly, while epidemic cholera drives goodly portions of the plot. Eventually Rodin himself is seized with the cholera, and Sue narrates a scene of carts filled with coffins clattering down city streets at night, invoking “the joyous strains of the grave diggers; public-houses had sprung up in the neighborhood of the churchyards, and the drivers of the dead, when they had “set down their customers,” as they jocosely expressed themselves, enriched with their unusual gratuities, feasted and made merry like lords; dawn often found them with a glass in their hands, and a jest on their lips; and, strange to say, among these funeral satellites, who breathed the very atmosphere of the disease, the mortality was scarcely perceptible.” The “dregs of the Paris mob” would gather near the main hospital and mock the vain ministrations of the physicians. As things become unruly, drums are heard in the distance, signaling a call to arms to quash sedition in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. When the drummers emerge from under an archway, an older one collapses, himself the sudden victim of cholera. There are shouts that he has been poisoned, having drunk from a fountain en route, and the expiring drummer is carried away to cries of “Make way for the corpse!” Not long thereafter, “The cholera masquerade” is proclaimed, “one of those episodes combining buffoonery with terror, which marked the period when the pestilence was on the increase…”
Second: the echo of satire. The French satirical magazine Le Charivari appears to have run its own version of “The wandering Jew” in 1845, where we find this scene featuring Rondin (not Rodin) from a chapter entitled “The cholera”: “The colics of Rondin were only the prelude to other, much more general colics, the cholera is definitely in Paris, as well as the death-eaters who earn mad money, who dance a polka of jubilation. The more Parisians rub their stomachs, the more they rub their hands! But what do you want, for these officials the Chemin du Père-Lachaise [along the largest cemetery in Paris] is the road to fortune!
Cholera has become so universal that it no longer respects anything and it even attacks the drums of the National Guard, which ordinarily still fears so much for its skin!
More than one drummer, while striking the beat, cannot finish the tune he has started on his instrument. Cholera has thus become a veritable death on the rim – and likewise on the flam.”
But in this version, when a “society of tramps” organizes the cholera masquerade, they are joined in their rowdy refrains by the Parisian medical faculty.
(Le Charivari, Paris, 1845)
OK, that was a long walk.
Sic Transit Pestilentia 